Does Empowering Women Improve the Economy?

Maha Atal
, ContributorI write about political economy and foreign affairs.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Last week's Lunch with the FT column featured an interview with Esther Duflo, MIT economist and co-author of Poor Economics. Duflo and her co-author Abhijit Banerjee run MIT's Poverty Action Lab, where they use randomized control experiments - a model borrowed from drug testing - to evaluate the effectiveness of development projects. The book is a combination of lessons from these experiments about what approaches work, and an attempt to understand and explain why the poor sometimes make choices that seem 'irrational' to outside observers. It's a great read, and I highly recommend it.

But I'm troubled by Duflo's response to a question from the FT's John Gapper about the role that women's empowerment plays in eradicating poverty.

“Giving more to women will to some extent come at the expense of men. People sometimes try to sweep that under the rug by saying you will create so much additional resources that everyone will be better off.” She smiles wryly but firmly. “I don’t think that’s true.”

Duflo's greatest contribution to development economics has been her emphasis on local data and her wariness of sweeping generalizations, so it is a surprise to find her making a generalization - without data - about the cost to men of women's empowerment. It's doubly surprising given that there is a wealth of research showing just the opposite: